WordPress Tools & Resources

Our favorite hosting, themes and plugins.

Hosting

When choosing a WordPress hosting company, there are a ton of options. First you need to decide whether to use Shared Hosting or Managed Hosting. Shared Hosting is cheaper and is a great option for 99% of WordPress sites. The SetUpWP site is hosted on a shared hosting account, and it works great. Managed Hosting is more expensive, faster, and comes with extra bells and whistles. If you’re in the 1%, it’s worth taking a look at managed hosting.

InMotion Hosting

InMotion Hosting – InMotion is our absolute favorite company for shared hosting. It’s super fast and reliable, and InMotion offers fantastic support. In our experience, InMotion is much better than the other big shared hosting companies like Bluehost and Hostgator.

Special Deal: We’ve partnered with InMotion to offer a special deal for SetUpWP visitors where you can save over 50% on your hosting plan. That means you can have rock solid hosting starting at just $3.49 a month. Get the special InMotion Hosting deal.

WP Engine

WP Engine – If you don’t mind paying a bit more (plans currently start at $29 per month), WP Engine is our favorite managed hosting company. They only host WordPress sites, offer nightly backups, and insanely fast speeds. They offer a 60-day money back guarantee. My Monthly Experiments Project site is hosted on WP Engine, and I’ve been extremely happy with them.

Themes

StudioPress

StudioPress – I only use StudioPress themes for my own websites. That should be testimonial enough, but I’ll still explain a little bit. Not all WordPress themes are created equal. StudioPress themes run on the Genesis Framework. That means that the theme’s core or foundation is separate from the design. So, when WordPress evolves, you can upgrade your Genesis framework without messing up your design customizations. It’s a way to future-proof your site and keep it safe. Oh, and the designs look fantastic on all devices, load quickly, and have built-in SEO features to help achieve great rankings. This site is built on the Enterprise Pro theme, which costs about $100.

WordPress Maintenance

WP Curve

WordPress Training

The Set Up WP Training Library – Well, we’ve got a few videos in our training library to show you how to handle the basics and get you up and running with your new blog or WordPress website.

WPU (aka WordPress University) – Bradley Charbonneau knows more about WordPress than just about anyone (especially me), and he’s put together an amazing library of WordPress tutorials over at WPU.me.

Domain Names

Namecheap

Namecheap – I used to use GoDaddy for all of my domain names, but over the years I’ve become less and less of a fan. So, I recently transfered all of my domain names to Namecheap. Honestly, GoDaddy is ok too. The main reason I switched away from GoDaddy is because they stopped offering discounted renewal coupons. They often have cheap promotions to get a domain for a couple bucks (see below) for the first year, but they they jack up the price to $15 a year. It’s not a big deal unless you have a lot of domain names (like me). Namecheap has cheaper renewals, good service, great prices, and is easy to work with. Done deal. (Namecheap.com)